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Friday, May 2, 2014

Haruki Murakami and Globalization

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Haruki
Murakami’s After Dark, a novel that
takes place in the space of only seven hours in Tokyo. The plot follows four
main characters and several minor characters from midnight to dawn of one day in
the grungy downtown entertainment district. I didn’t like the novel as much as
Murakami’s stellar The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, or his short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, but After
Dark does have a couple of classic Murakami scenes where he is at his best,
and those scenes alone make the novel worthwhile.

Haruki Murakami with jazz records

Murakami is a master at creating a situation where two
characters encounter one another by chance and start talking deeply, and
suddenly their hearts and thoughts spring open up in a way that is
extraordinary and reveals surprising truths.

I love Murakami's writing, so I
was quite surprised when I heard him taken to task at an international
symposium on literature I attended a few years ago. At the Third Seoul
International Forum for Literature in 2011, eminent Korean scholar Yu Jong-ho,
professor emeritus at Yonsei University, criticized Murakami at a session where
I also spoke on “The Globalizing World and the Human Community.” Though his
criticisms of Murakami didn’t focus on the globalization of literature per se,
Professor Yu’s comments appeared to me to be prompted in part by the
Westernized cultural references in Murakami’s fiction.

After Dark is a
prime example. Though the novel takes place in Tokyo, it begins in a Denny’s
Restaurant. There are numerous discussions of music in the book, partly because
one of the main characters, Takahashi Tetsyta, is an aspiring jazz trombonist.
Almost all the music referred to in Murakami’s novel is from the U.S.A. or the
U.K. All the food the characters eat is Western, from chicken salad (there are
some hilarious bits about Denny’s chicken salad!) to tuna sandwiches to a
fluffy omelet (which, like the love that develops between the two protagonists,
is never actually indulged in).

One of the only things in the novel that is distinctively
Japanese is a love hotel, not exactly what you’d call classic East Asian
culture. Even the love hotel is named for a Jean-Luc Godard movie, Alphaville (sometimes After Dark seems to take place in the
futuristic world of Godard’s Alphaville).

So, is this a problem that Murakami’s characters seem to
move in a world where Japanese culture, so rich and venerable, no longer seems
to exist? The references that Murakami’s characters make
to vintage jazz tunes, which he knows extremely well (he once ran a jazz club
in Tokyo), are fascinating to me, and they make his characters appealing and
endearing, from my standpoint. I’m a huge jazz fan myself. I would never want Murakami to
feature Japanese culture in a way that would Orientalize or exoticize his own
country. Nor would I want to see Murakami respond in an extremely nationalistic
and negative way to Westernization, in the manner of Yukio Mishima, for
instance, perhaps the other best known Japanese novelist of the last three
generations.

Maybe that’s part of why Murakami has immersed himself so
deeply in Western culture, as an antidote to his country’s militaristic nationalism
and to the conformist culture of the “salaryman” that has dug so deeply
into Japanese life. But I can’t help but wonder why Murakami sees no precedents
for his own rebellion within Japanese literary and artistic culture. What of
the great poet Yosano Akiko, for instance, who defied expectations that she
would continue to run the family business and fled to Tokyo from a provincial
town in order to elope with her lover, the poet Yosano Tekkan? She was also a
foe of the status quo. What of the poets of the Arechi or Waste Land movement in post-World War II Japanese poetry,
such as the wonderful Tamura Ryuichi? Why doesn’t Murakami see his legacy
through these and other Japanese writers? Has he become infatuated with the
culture of the U.S.A. to the point where he can no longer see the strengths of
his country’s own legacy?